Mobile communication services are expanding and increasing in popularity around the world. Many advanced networks offer wireless mobile communication service for voice calls, mobile messaging services (e.g., text and/or multimedia) and data communications. The data services, for example, enable surfing the world wide web via a browser or downloading files or applications from third party web servers. Data services may also support real-time streaming of audio, video, or other multimedia content.
Variations in network performance can significantly impact a user's perception of the quality of the data service that the network offers, and thus impact subscriber satisfaction. A network carrier's ability to accurately measure a network's performance, an improvement in a network's performance in response to an upgrade in equipment or protocols, and/or to measure other carriers' networks' performances, may provide the carrier with a competitive advantage over competitors.
The measurement of a mobile communication network's transport layer capabilities, such as the measurement of the network's data transfer rate (i.e., network speed, or network bandwidth), can be affected by the network's automatic caching of content and the network's compression of content. For example, in measuring the network's data transfer rate, the automatic caching of commonly-accessed content by a performance enhancing proxy server (PEP) may obfuscate measurement of transport layer data transfer rate between a remote server and a user equipment (UE) device by causing a cached version of the content to be provided to the UE by the PEP instead of the content being retrieved from the remote server. Additionally, a network's built-in compression may cause a network data transfer rate measurement (i.e., network speed measurement, or network bandwidth measurement) performed with a highly compressible file to differ from a measurement performed with an uncompressible file.
Current methods for measuring network performance are sensitive to content caching and compression. Network performance measurements performed using such methods therefore generally do not accurately reflect the network's overall performance.